


Ultimo

by terryh_nyan



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Gen, Hallucinations, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Spoilers, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 03:59:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14803937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terryh_nyan/pseuds/terryh_nyan
Summary: He can still see himself running towards his spot at the trial. Running, for the first time in his life without a goal in mind. He'd ran and ran and he'd almost touched him.Almost.---Ouma gets his wish.





	Ultimo

**Author's Note:**

> No idea where this came from. Unbeta'd because it's kind of one of those raw fics that you jot down in a matter of hours and that you're afraid, if you'll go back to it, you'll change it so much nothing of what it was will be left (at least, I know that's what I'd do if I reread it, like, tomorrow).
> 
> Enjoy this piece of Hurt Without Comfort because apparently I like to suffer

Saihara was never one to intrude on others. If he caught someone while they were busy, he would stand awkwardly in a corner of the room, not knowing what to do. If the other person noticed him, he’d say hello; otherwise, he’d leave, quiet as a shadow.

He has to wonder why this Saihara happens to be the most annoying thing in the universe.

“What are you reading?”

Ouma clicks his tongue on the roof of his mouth. “A joke book.”

“It says _Quantum Physics_ on the cover.”

“Yup, that’s the joke.”

“And it’s upside down.”

“Ever observant.”

Saihara – the real Saihara – would’ve taken the hint by now that he doesn’t feel like being hassled. Then again, he never would’ve turned the real Saihara away.

This Saihara, however, takes his noncommittal responses as a cue to sit down next to him.

“Is it interesting?” Saihara inquires, hovering over his shoulder like a small bird.

“Well, duh. More interesting than you, anyway.” Ouma flips through the pages, the words sǝןoɥ ʞɔɐןq staring at him quizzically from the top of a paragraph. “In fact, it’s so interesting, I wish you would just stop bothering me so I can finish my summer reading in time.”

“In time for what?”

“I don’t know. The apocalypse we were promised. Wouldn’t you rather die an educated man?”

Saihara lets out a small chuckle. Heartfelt, light. “Somehow, I feel I should rectify every word you just said.”

Ouma closes the book and throws it behind his back. It lands on the floor with a thud. “How about you don’t.” He gets up, stretching as he makes his way into the kitchen. Maybe he’ll start on some tea. He hates tea, but it goes well with cake, so.

“You know I can’t do that.”

He can feel the apologetic smile playing on this Saihara’s lips before he sees it. It’s the most unfair thing in the world.

He sits down on the counter while the kettle boils. Saihara leans on the back of a chair, facing Ouma.

“Alright,” he says, and there’s that smile again, even if the sadness it carried seconds before is only a memory, “I’ll skip the part where I tell you it’s nearly impossible to read a book upside down.”

Ouma yawns. It’s fake, but he can barely tell the difference at this point. “I doubt a serious person like you, Saihara–chan, would know. Have you ever tried it? They say looking at things from another perspective can be enlightening.”

“I haven’t tried it, no, but I’m not sure that piece of philosophy applies here.” He’s half-laughing again, crinkles forming at the corners of his eyes. “Anyway, there wouldn’t be any point in me trying now.”

Ouma’s feet are dangling from the counter. He kicks them lightly, pretending to be on a swing. Higher, higher.

“Hasn’t a nerd like you ever read _The Count of Montecristo_? It’s never too late to become a learned person. See the world. Connect with the universe.”

Saihara’s downcast eyes fixate on the tip of his shoes. “It is for me.”

The kettle whistles. It’s sharp, it’s piercing, and Ouma’s thankful for the distraction.

He jumps off the counter. His feet hit hard on the floor. Pain shoots sharp up his knees.

“Not for you, though.”

Ouma pours the water down the sink.

“Yeah” he says, quietly, watching the whirlpool of the drain drawing in the water. Steam rises up to caress Ouma’s face and then up, up to the ceiling, leaving his cheeks cold and damp. He wishes he could go with either of them. Instead, he’s stuck in the middle. Always stuck in the middle. “Yeah, it is.”

***

“Is that Camilleri?”

Yes. “Nope. Go away.”

His Saihara never would’ve dreamed to stay after that. This one lies down next to him instead, a spark of curiosity in his glimmering golden eyes.

“I used to love Camilleri. Got obsessed with Italian culture for, like, a month after reading a couple of his novels. Did you know we got mafia completely wrong in all of our media? Not nearly as alluring as we make it out to be, apparently.”

Of course he knows that. The only reason this Saihara can even speak about it is because Ouma had researched every single criminal organization on the face of the Earth so that he could model DICE after them. Or at least that’s how he remembers it.

“Nooo. Romanticizing criminals? Us? You’re shocking me, Saihara–chan. I can’t thing of a single way this world would ever find crimes charming.”

“Isn’t it a bit too soon to be joking about that?”

 _If anything_ , Ouma thinks, _it’s_ _way_ _too late_.

Saihara sighs. Ouma almost feels it on his cheek. It’s cruel.

“Anyway, like I said, I got really obsessed for a few weeks. I heard translating those novels is a worldwide nightmare. No true way to get the Sicilian dialect across and all that. So I looked up a few words in Italian, just to poke around.”

There was no way the real Saihara would’ve bothered looking up anything that wasn’t in Japanese or, at most, in English. Saihara didn’t care for languages; he cared for the mystery behind the words, for the truth beneath the lie. The only enigmas he would ever try his hand at were the ones he could actually solve with logic. Maybe that was why they’d never spoken as often as Ouma would’ve liked.

Maybe Saihara had never understood him, not even at the end.

And now, he finds himself spending time with this… this carbon copy concocted by his mind. A version of Saihara he can share interests with.

A version of Saihara who understands.

A lie.

“And I found this word. _Ultimo_. I thought it sounded a lot like our international title – Ultimate – so I looked it up.”

“And?”

“And it turns out it doesn’t mean Ultimate at all. It means _last_.”

Huh. Now this piece of trivia, Ouma doesn’t remember knowing. He tries the titles on the tip of his tongue. “Last Astronaut. Last Entomologist. Last Inventor.”

_Last Detective._

Saihara nods in agreement. “Last Supreme Leader.”

Ouma pauses. The characters on the pages fade, ink melting into paper, paper melting into nothingness. “Last Survivor.”

***

“A recipe website?”

Ouma wonders why this Saihara seems to pipe up only when he’s reading. Maybe he should follow Gonta’s example. Run off into the woods, away from civilization and evil things like written speech. “I was thinking of making a smoothie.”

“Oh.” This Saihara doesn’t have boundaries. He sits on the edge of the tub, not the slightest hint of embarrassment on his cheeks. “With what?”

Ouma guesses this Saihara can’t feel anything he’s not feeling. Boring.

“Marshmallows and Panta.”

Boring boring _boring_ –

“That doesn’t sound too healthy.”

“Eh. I’ll live.”

Saihara’s eyes travel over his body. Their gazes meet. The light from the screen reflects off Ouma’s eyes.

“You sound like you mean it.”

Ouma makes a fist around his phone. “Of course I fucking mean it. After all they’ve put us through, I’m not giving them the satisfaction.”

Silence stretches between them, blessed silence that Ouma knows isn’t permanent. With this Saihara, it never is.

“Good.”

Ouma blinks. He wasn't expecting that response.

Maybe it’s just that the word feels wrong on Saihara’s lips. _His_ Saihara, his _beloved_ Saihara, never would’ve wanted anyone to live on out of spite.

He wonders, though, if his beloved Saihara would’ve wanted him to live on after all.

“Why won’t you leave me alone?” Ouma snarls, and it sounds like a horrifying plea. “You’ve done it once already. How hard can it be to do it twice?”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“You said I deserved to be alone. That I’d always be alone. Well, that’s all I’m asking–”

“And if you really meant it...” Saihara starts, softly. For a moment, he almost sounds like the real one – quiet words and hesitation, but an inevitability to his statements like bullets fired through the skull. “I’d be gone by now.”

Ouma’s throat tightens.

Then he feels himself barking out a hollow, raw laughter born from somewhere deep. Somewhere desperate. Somewhere that’s swallowed him whole.

“You always made things so much harder for me, you know that?”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“You took one life to save fourteen. I took all your lives to prove I was right.”

Saihara gives him a sympathetic look. Ouma never needed his pity when Saihara was alive; he isn’t about to accept it now that he’s dead.

“You didn’t take those lives.”

Easy for him to say. He hadn’t been the one screaming at Monokuma that Momota had died of natural causes inside the hangar, leaving him no choice but to crush his body under the press so that they could have the trial to end all trials. He hadn’t been the one to plead with the enemy to exchange his life for theirs – _he_ had been the one to break the game; _he_ had been the one to pull the strings behind that farce of a trial; _he_ hadn’t killed anyone, he wasn’t the blackened, they hadn’t gotten it wrong because there had never been a murder in the first place, they didn’t deserve to be–

“No, you’re right. PsychoBear, Bluebitch and Hunk of Junk did. But I was still the one to get away with murder.”

He wonders why he never sees any of the others like he sees this Saihara, even though he sees them every night in his nightmares – Gonta’s tear-stained face, Momota’s lifeless body, Iruma gasping for air. Harukawa, falling first under the blows of Killing Machine Pinocchio, who so wanted to be a real boy but who had been programmed from the start as their mass executioner. Then Yumeno, whose last magic trick had been a disappearing act behind the blinding light of a laser bigger than she was.

Saihara had been the last. Ouma had met his gaze moments before he died. The last words to leave his lips had been his name. He can think of a million names more deserving of that.

He can still see himself running towards his spot at the trial. Running, for the first time in his life without a goal in mind. He'd ran and ran and he'd almost touched him.

Almost.

“It’s not on you.”

Yeah. Yeah, it is.

“Saihara–chan… You really are a terrible liar.”

***

Ouma wonders every day if it was worth it.

Will it be permanent? Thanks to Ouma, the whole sick thing had been canceled without a second thought, blasted along with Shirogane's lying face. The viewers – scum of the Earth – had gotten angry at the way their precious rules had been treated. Not at the loss of lives, but at the loss of meaning. He'd hoped for that. In case all else failed, he'd hoped for that.

But he'd also hoped he wouldn't be alive to see it happen.

Ouma wonders every day if it's worth it. Keeping up the charade, wearing the mask of a living person when, in fact, he feels like the last of Kokichi Ouma died with that almost-touch, under the blinding light. The last of Kokichi Ouma is dust inside the dust of Shuichi Saihara’s fingertips.

Day after day, Ouma wonders.

**Author's Note:**

> I definitely don't have a thing for DR characters hallucinating loved ones. Who told you that?


End file.
